Razer Introduces Black Widow 13 Keyboard and Ouroboros Mouse

Razer's no stranger to cutting edge gaming tech, and today they proved it - announcing an updated line of Black Widow 2013 Keyboards and revealing a new, lightweight Tournament Edition for the focused PC gamer.

The Black Widow Ultimate 2013 and Ultimate Stealth 2013 models come with all the aesthetic and mechanical adornments you might expect from a $140 gaming keyboard. Alongside the 45g actuation force and 10 key anti-ghosting features are backlit keys, on-the-fly macro and key programming, and USB passthrough. These 2013 models are also getting in on the cloud storage game, allowing users to save keyboard preferences and configurations to the Razer cloud with the Synapse 2.0 service. Through in the braided fiber cables and a relatively lightweight form factor (3.31 lbs.) and this piece of tech feels like it's just about tournament ready.

Perhaps it's not as tournament ready, though, as the aptly-named Tournament Edition 2013, a keyboard that eschews most of the unnecessary frills in favor of a clean vision and purpose. Gone is the num-pad, replaced by a blue switch mechanical key infrastructure for added responsive and durability. Coming in at $80, the Tournament Edition is an even more tempting buy for serious gamers looking for portability.

No keyboard would be complete, however, without a worthy mouse counterpart. Razer's also provided the answer to this quandary with the Ouroboros, a cleverly designed bit of gaming tech that's designed to be ambidextrous and configurable for comfort and speed.

Like the Ultimate 2013, the Ouroboros and its 4G Dual Sensor System, 11 programmable buttons, and 1 ms response time will set you back considerably. $130 for the mouse, $140 for the keyboard, and over $2000 for a solid rig would get any serious gamer into competitive shape in a hurry.

Dan Crabtree is an I.T. guy and freelance writer with words on IGN, and a league of other gaming news outlets. His dog is considered handsome and well-read. You can find him (the human) on Twitter and IGN.